Leontine “Tina” Bundy Nappe grew up on a small ranch in Washoe Valley. Having a father who was a nationally acclaimed artist, Gus Bundy, meant that she had exposure to art and prominent artists at a very young age. Tina spent her first five years schooled in a one room schoolhouse in Washoe Valley before moving to a larger city population. She graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno and spent the next year traveling in Europe. Returning to Nevada, she was hired to work with ichthyologist Dr. Richard Miller and Maya Miller at the Foresta Institute and became involved in conservation. While working with Dr. Miller, Nevada’s first rare and endangered species law was passed by the state legislature. It was the first state-based law in the nation dealing specifically with rare and endangered species. Leaving that line of work, but it remained a center of interest, Tina became director of the nationally funded Job Training Partnership Act for Nevada. One of her projects was the creation of a statewide Pro-Net program dealing with retraining a large group of unemployed middle management individuals, mainly men, whose jobs had been terminated through company downsizing or purchase by larger organizations and, and who lacked computer related skills to successfully reenter the work force. In her retirement years, Tina’s activities revolve around state and national legislation to save the state’s limited wetlands through better use of Nevada’s limited water supply.
Leontine “Tina” Bundy Nappe was interviewed by the Nevada Women’s History Project on December 10, 2022, through a grant from the Estelle J. Kelsey Foundation.